Hide Preview's transparent layers

Reader Daniel sees both more and less from the PDF documents displayed in Preview than he cares to. He writes:

When I open a PDF with Preview that was created with the “Save to PDF” option in the print dialogue of any application, the background is transparent—it shows up as a dark and light gray checkerboard behind the text. This makes the text impossible to read. It’s the same behavior you’d expect to see in a transparent image file in Preview or Photoshop. I assume there is a setting somewhere to disable transparency for PDF files (but not images) in Preview, but I do not know where to find it. How can I fix this?

You’re correct, this checkerboard pattern indicates that Preview is displaying a transparent layer. To make it go away, simply uncheck the Show Document Background command in the View menu. You should now see the document as you’d like, rather than with the distracting pattern.